An eclectic view of life, family, and work in Olympia and environs.

Month: December 2007

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I received my Chumby (a gift from Dingo, the “PC black” model) shipped directly from the factory in China to my door in 4 business days and hand delivered by a smartly dressed (overly energetic) UPS employee, who got it to me on time, even though there was a biblical-ish flood that shut down the freeway and generally has brought havoc to our front door.

I immediately went over the Chumby site, and set it up to display flickr pictures, and a few RSS news (yes news news) feeds that I read regularly, most notably; OlyBlog.

I’m using SSH to get into it and try to start Free Radio Olympia via the command line with instructions I found at the Chumby Wiki. This is cool, as it allows me to listen to my own streams, or MP3 playlists via NFS or HTTP, as well, while using the other Chumby based flash widgets, such as ones that let me look at my friend’s flickr streams…

It’s refreshing to know that the Chumby execs and engineers trust their users enough to allow them to mess up their devices, and they encourage hacking and a free flow of ideas on new widgets and how to get the thing to do “more stuff.”

Now, I’m going to ask around and find out about getting the Splashcast Player to work on it, and I’ll be very happy indeed.

This in contrast to the iPhone, of course. . . . who’s hackability is well known (and demonized by Apple and AT&T as being “illegal”, and they will break your phone if they catch you doing it. . . . Just makes you want to “kick Steve Jobs in the nuuuttttzzzz!”, sometimes, yes?